Opinion Contributor

Recapturing U.S. leadership on trade

President Barack Obama has shown a desire to expand trade opportunities. This is a refreshing switch from two years of ignoring pending free trade agreements with important U.S. allies; violating a long-standing agreement with Mexico, and trying to restrict certain imports that unions don’t want.

The U.S. has long been a world leader in trade, promoting the value and benefits of free markets. But providing that leadership hasn’t always been easy.

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President Bill Clinton was willing to buck his own party to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. “Al and I had called or seen 200 members of Congress,” Clinton explains in his autobiography, “and the Cabinet had made 900 calls.”

The result of this intense, hands-on effort? NAFTA passed the House with 240 votes (102 Democratic and 132 Republican), and the Senate by 61-38.

More important, NAFTA was passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress, when the country was in the middle of an acrimonious debate over health care reform. Does that sound familiar? Despite this, the vote was about as bipartisan as you can get.

Things are different today, unfortunately. The U.S. has lost its role as a free trade leader. Free trade agreements with Colombia and Panama have been languishing for years — as had negotiations with South Korea until recently.

Meanwhile, the European Union is aggressively promoting free trade agreements, opening up the world to more European products.

Obama has set a national goal of doubling exports, expressed his support for expanding trade as a way to create U.S. jobs and forged a new free trade agreement with South Korea. These are steps in the right direction, but progress is not likely to come easily.

While Republicans tend to be more supportive of free trade agreements than Democrats, there are vociferous naysayers in both parties. Doubts about trade have also escalated during a long and deep recession. Obama, like Clinton, must be willing to commit the time, effort and political capital to get the job done.

To be successful, Obama will first have to make the case that free trade agreements are good for the U.S. and U.S. workers. Ninety-five percent of consumers are in other countries. If we want more people buying U.S. products, we will have to tap foreign markets.

So we have to ensure that U.S. products are available at the lowest possible price — which means little or no tariffs on U.S. goods and services. The best way to achieve that goal is with a free trade agreement.

Put me in the "vociferously opposed" camp. The "free trade" mantra is a job killer for this country. Manufacturers in the USA are not, as a general rule, going to be able to compete successfully with manufacturers in foreign countries that pay less than $5/hour in wages, that do not require manufacturers to safeguard worker safety, and that do not require businesses to respect the environment by adopting effective pollution controls.

If we want to create jobs in this country, we need to harnass our huge domestic market for goods and services to this task by imposing tariffs that take away the price advantages gained by foreign manufacturers as a result of our devotion to these three principles. We are going to have to pay more for the goods manufactured here, in likelihood, but that is a price I would pay to create the jobs our children and grandchildren need.

Where a foreign nation will buy enough products manufactured with American labor to counterbalance the job loss that will attend exempting some or all of their nation's products from the tariff regimen, we should give the exemption.

However, allowing third world countries to flood our markets with manufactured goods made with what is essentially slave labor, working in unsafe sweatshops that spew pollution into the environment, is not good for us or for the world generally.

Put me in the "vociferously opposed" camp. The "free trade" mantra is a job killer for this country. Manufacturers in the USA are not, as a general rule, going to be able to compete successfully with manufacturers in foreign countries that pay less than $5/hour in wages, that do not require manufacturers to safeguard worker safety, and that do not require businesses to respect the environment by adopting effective pollution controls.

I agree. Ross Perot said about NAFTA "If this goes thru, you'll hear a giant sucking sound of all the jobs leaving the US". He was right.

We also don't have "free trade" within the US now - with so many subsidies and loopholes which favor mega-corporations, smaller companies can't grow.

There is truth that job growth comes from small companies, yet the policies in place favor the mega-corporations.